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Sunday, 3 December 2017

Hello
everyone! Newlife 0.4.14 has been released. The patreon version is here. The changelog is below.Due to the delay in releasing this version, I've made it public straight away and it can be downloaded using the links to the right.As usual, saved files & templates from older versions probably won't work with newer ones. For
new players - just use one of the links to the right to get a zipfile containing Newlife. Once unzipped, you'll see a folder containing .jar and .exe files. Either one of these will run the game.For
either version you'll need to have Java installed. A lot of programs
use Java so you might well already have it. If the jar shows up as an
unrecognised file type, then you probably don't. In that case you can
get it from http://www.java.com/. The
exe should tell you if you don't have the right version on your
computer, but you'll still need to install java to run the game.There's a guide for new players here which includes some troubleshooting tips for installation & downloading.This version focuses on a plotline involving the PC's BF's jerk friend. To access these scenes you need:

- A boyfriend who does not have the selfish or jerk personality, does not have the doormat or likes-to-share traits and is not Horse.- In a relationship for at least 4 weeks- Some liking and love for him (the requirements are fairly low but aromantic will block this chain)Changelog:

Major
changes & additions:

Added a 4-scene event chain based around the “boyfriend's jerk
friend” PMW winner.

Minor
changes & bugfixes:

Fixes to text issues. Thanks to
OrangeJuice, Rigel, Secondarian, Fiery Dog Poop, Aethar, Flanjygo,
Saur and Never for reporting some of these.

Fixed an error reported by DrGong and
Antage when you repeat the innocent befriending scene with an NPC
you'd formerly befriended by going down the lowlife boyfriend path.

Fixed an error reported by Dunan
Rayne and Jjrider in the “Friends don't blackmail” action of the
jerk blackmail scene.

As requested by Kaorok, the main menu
can now be resized without cutting off the buttons.

Added a potential partner effect for
the doormat trait.

Added a friendship level check that
was missing from the conditions for Rigel's lowlife event. This now needs a CLOSE
friendship level to fire.

Added some flags to the blackmail
scene as suggested by thereisnospoon to block condom use when the
NPC insisted on inseminating the PC.

Doormat boyfriends will no longer
dump you if you get pregnant by someone else. Thanks to Bartran for
reporting this.

Fixed a “no actions” error
reported by Dunkaroodle when the boss asks your innocent colleague
to have anal sex during the electrocouch scene.

Fixed an issue reported by MadCat
where men would compliment you on your outfit even when you were
completely naked. They will now only do so if you're wearing at
least one article of clothing.

Fixed an issue reported by jjrider
where your character would mention being on the pill when asking a
man to finish inside her, even if she'd lied to him about it
previously.

Fixed a bug reported by Saur where
the “no condom, no sex” option could be picked repeatedly even
after the man put on a condom the first time.

Added 2 hidden traits requested by
Fryett. These will currently never appear except on custom NPCs:
UNLOVABLE prevents the PC from gaining love points towards that
specific NPC, ODDLY_UNATTRACTIVE provides an attractiveness penalty
and also caps starting attractiveness so they'll always begin as
being unattractive to the PC regardless of body-type or traits like
HANDSOME. Attractiveness can increase over time though so this might
change in-game.

Added an NPC cunning trait that stops
the PC's bf discovering cheating with them. This isn't randomly
assigned to NPCs at present but can be added to custom ones.

Added new options that let the player
modify the starting number of NPCs when a game is begun.

Fixed various errors with the first
pass at 0.4.14, including ones reported by Flanjygo & Saur.

Friday, 1 December 2017

Hi all, I was aiming to get the next version out tonight, but I feel
like there's too much left to do and I've got to a point where I'm too
tired to write decent content or reliably track down bugs.

I was perhaps too optimistic to attempt to squeeze in four scenes in one release, even though none of them is individually massive. I've also been hindered by my ongoing arm troubles but even so I feel pretty bad. I should have seen this coming and scaled back my ambitions or perhaps put out one of the scenes as a yml/vm framework for volunteers to fill in the details. I just buried my head in the sand. It was dumb and unprofessional.

I'm kind of upset about this as it means that this will be the first ever month without an update. What I'll be doing is releasing the public version tomorrow along with the patron one. That way anyone who supported in November but not December will still get the new version.

After tomorrow, there'll be another release in mid-december: I'll be aiming for around the 20th. I'll try to learn my lessons and start off by getting a simple version done that I can build on instead of leaving myself in a position where I have to implement everything I planned at the start of the month and have no real time set aside for contingencies.I've made a post on Patreon from which this blog post is mostly copied. As I said there, if any patrons feel this isn't good enough then they should PM me over on that site.

Wednesday, 8 November 2017

This is a post I've had sitting on my hard drive for over a month - I anticipate it might lead to a lot of typing for me so I've been reluctant to post it while my keyboard time was limited.

I feel that I'm getting better day by day though so I'm posting it now before I forget about it completely. Just remember that I'm still not 100% so don't expect me to be getting into long written discussions!

I'd
like to talk about a rather divisive fetish: non-consent.

Nonconsent
is a popular fetish that's often requested by players. However, it
has some key issues that prevent it being part of the main Newlife
release. I'm going to put them in a bullet-point list, because I love
bullet-points so much that I might put a path into the wedding scene
where the player gets to marry one.

Firstly,
while it's often requested I also often hear from people who are
happy it isn't included. While it could be gated behind a trait
similar to block_rough, it's questionable whether it's a good idea
for me to be dedicating my development/writing time to content that
I know a significant number of players actively dislike.

Secondly,
"glorification
of rape and sexual violence" is forbidden under Patreon's
community guidelines. This seems like it would block a lot of
potential nonconsent content.

Third, it's legally questionable for
a UK-based developer. While writing the guides for the
user-submissions content I found the Crown Prosecution Service's
guidelines on the Obscene Publications Act, a law which has been
used to arrest people for text-only content in the past. This has a
section on content most commonly prosecuted which includes
"realistic portrayals of rape".

In summary: Non-consensual content can
never be featured in the main Newlife release. It isn't something
I'll be working on and it also won't be allowed on the PMW voting
list or accepted in scenes submitted for inclusion.

However, with the addition of
user-submissions, there may be avenues for it to be included as a
separate add-on that wouldn't be affected by the above:

The first issue is essentially a
problem with the efficient use of my limited development time.
However, if the nonconsent content is principally written by a team
of volunteers then it wouldn't affect other content

The second one is only an issue for
content on Patreon. If it's an add-on distributed separately then
that shouldn't be a problem

The OPA only applies to people who
publish content. If I'm not directly involved in creating this
add-on and I'm not the one who distributes it then I think that
would be safe for me. For example, the team creating it could host
it on a blog that they control, and I could simply have a link to
their site from this blog here. Of course the people who do make the
non-consent addition might have to worry about the OPA, but that
wouldn't be a concern if they aren't based in the UK.

I've set up a discussion board on
Discord to allow volunteers to contribute towards a community-created
rape add-on for Newlife.

This will be a sort of semi-official
project that won't be written, edited or distributed by me but that I
will link to from the blog so players have an easy way of accessing
it.

It'll also need a way of hooking into
the main game without being restricted to the testing scene, but that
needn't be an insurmountable problem – I'll discuss this further
with the NC writers when/if a group of them have got together and
figured out what sort of NC content they want to add.

There are some ground rules I want to
put in place. These should all be common sense, but my time on the
internet has taught me to never assume common sense from every member
of a group of random online strangers!

First, the NC add-on absolutely must
not risk legal consequences for players. As such, it must not
include any sexual content involving under-18s, including sexualised
descriptions of them or them being present while someone else has
sex.

Second, if I'm going to link to
something and help it connect up to my work then it shouldn't risk
negative consequences for me, be they personal, financial or legal.
This shouldn't be an issue, but don't do anything dumb like using
the add-on to rile up easily-offended people who are likely to form
an online hate mob.

The add-on should be the volunteers'
own work and should not include any copyrighted characters or
real-life people. I don't want to have to deal with people sending
in cease-and-desists or plagarism lawsuits.

The add-on should focus on nonconsent
and related content only. Consensual content should be submitted for
inclusion in the main-game, as this lets it also be enjoyed by
people who aren't into rape.

Extreme fetishes other than
nonconsent shouldn't be included in this add-on. It's supposed to be
the rape add-on, not the "every fetish imaginable" one! If
the NC add-on is successful then I'm open to starting similar
projects for some other extreme fetishes but the aim is that they
would have separate downloads so people could pick and choose the
ones they're interested in.

Distribution will be something I'll
discuss in more detail with the NC team: probably they'll need to
set up a blog or something, but that can wait until something's
ready for players. However, any distribution must be gated
behind an "are you over 18" interstitial and it must
make clear to the player what sort of content it includes (i.e.
rape) before they download and play it.

The add-on should be playable before
being released. Something that crashes all the time or runs into a
bunch of "to be continued" dead-ends isn't really suitable
for Newlife.

As I'm not involved in the add-on's
development I also won't be able to help with bugfixing. As such,
the people who make it should be prepared to take error/typo reports
from players and fix them.

The first stage towards this is for NC
volunteers to get together on the discord, talk about what they want
to work on collaboratively and maybe start prototyping outlines for a
scene or two. I won't be organising the group or working as part of
it, but once they've got an idea of what sort of scenes they want to
add first then we can discuss how they can connect into the game.

If you want to be part of this group
and work on NC content then head to the Newlife Discord and check out the nc-discussion channel
under the "Nonconsent Project" category.

Have fun, and remember, Newlife is
entirely fictional and I do not condone using it as a guide on how to
behave in real-life!

Wednesday, 1 November 2017

Hello
everyone! Newlife 0.4.13 has been released.
Early-access Patrons can find it in the creations section here. The changelog is below.The previous version is now public. You can download it using the links on the right-hand side of the blog. The public version's changelog is here.As usual, saved files & templates from older versions probably won't work with newer ones. For
new players - just use one of the links to the right to get a zipfile containing Newlife. Once unzipped, you'll see a folder containing .jar and .exe files. Either one of these will run the game.For
either version you'll need to have Java installed. A lot of programs
use Java so you might well already have it. If the jar shows up as an
unrecognised file type, then you probably don't. In that case you can
get it from http://www.java.com/. The
exe should tell you if you don't have the right version on your
computer, but you'll still need to install java to run the game.There's a guide for new players here which includes some troubleshooting tips for installation & downloading.

This is the first of two PMW releases. There were two joint winners for the vote and I've had some issues with work this month due to an injury so I decided to just have 2 separate releases instead of trying to get it all into one. This one is focused on manipulative content for the cunning trait. The largest chunk of new content is probably the lowlife changes: choose "throw her under the bus" to access this path. The next release will implement the other PMW winner, which was content related to a jerk friend of the PC's boyfriend.

This release also marks the first user-written scene to be included into Newlife - great timing considering I'd been having a bad month until Rigel swooped in to save the day!Changelog:

Major
changes & additions:

Added new content based around the cunning trait. Some of this is
not available for Nice characters. This includes:

Cheating at the card game

Convincing your innocent friend to get involved with the lowlives.

Getting the innocent colleague to sort out the boss' problem during
a presentation at work (innocent NPCs really are getting the short
end of the stick in this release)

Cheating at the partner dance contest. Some of the existing solo
cheating options are also now available for non-bitchy cunning
characters but players still need the bitchy trait to access the
crueller paths.

Accessing the “helping an impregnator” friendship event. I'm
not convinced this shockingly evil scheme makes much sense for a
non-evil character but I've had a lot of requests to slacken the
requirements and it is relevant for cunning characters.

Included a new scene that was written by Rigel. In this scene you
run into the lowlives again when on a day out with your friend.
Anyone interested in Velocity should definitely check out Rigel's
work. Their skill with Velocity certainly exceeds mine so we can all
learn from them!

Minor
changes & bugfixes:

Fixes to text issues. Thanks to
Death25, OrangeJuice, Megh, Pgiac6 and Thomas123 for reporting some
of these.

Fixed an error reported by Antage in
the blackmail scene when you use the “friends don't blackmail”
action.

Fixed a bug where “addFlag” was
being called instead of “hasFlag” in one of the blackmail scene
conditions.

The cunning trait now gives +10 to
starting charm.

As requested by FutureSight, the
“shop for your flat” action now shows your money when the scene
starts and in the describe-scene text and window-shopping action.

Modified NPC preference scoring so
that impregnators should be better disposed towards the “have 3
kids” vow request unless they don't like children.

Added a new male orgasm text for the
first time you sleep with your boss, as long as it's in the
missionary position and without a condom.

The game will now generate 4
lowlives, as there's a chance that the new path can block one from
being available for the befriending scene so there needs to be a
replacement. The scene itself still only uses 3, chosen randomly
from the available ones.

Changes
for user-submitted content:

Yaml files can now include an optional characterDescriptionTextId
entry to override the default character descriptions: see the yml
syntax guide for details. If you want to use the default
functionality then you should leave this entry out completely.

The haveOrgasm method is now also available for male NPCs: you can
thank Rigel for pointing out this omission in their scene
submission.

Saturday, 30 September 2017

Hello
everyone! Newlife 0.4.12 has been released.
Early-access Patrons can find it in the creations section here. The changelog is below.The previous version is now public. You can download it using the links on the right-hand side of the blog. The public version's changelog is here.As usual, saved files & templates from older versions probably won't work with newer ones. For
new players - just use one of the links to the right to get a zipfile containing Newlife. Once unzipped, you'll see a folder containing .jar and .exe files. Either one of these will run the game.For
either version you'll need to have Java installed. A lot of programs
use Java so you might well already have it. If the jar shows up as an
unrecognised file type, then you probably don't. In that case you can
get it from http://www.java.com/. The
exe should tell you if you don't have the right version on your
computer, but you'll still need to install java to run the game.There's a guide for new players here which includes some troubleshooting tips for installation & downloading.

This
verson adds the blackmail scene from the custom scene example. I know that the example blog posts aren't finished yet: my keyboard time has been a bit limited this past week due to a (hopefully minor) injury so I'm putting them off for next month. You can see the finished version in the additional_scenes/official_content folder and it's hooked and playable in the game itself without using the testing scene.Writers should be aware that this version makes a lot of changes to the custom scene system - things like renaming methods to be more consistent. This should make writing easier in the long run but for now you'll probably need to run a find & replace over any scenes you've written to update the names that have changed.Changelog:

Major
changes & additions:

Added a new random event: the cheating-blackmail one from the custom
scene example blog posts.

Doormat and Likes_to_share traits are
now enabled for custom NPCs, thanks to Megh for reminding me of
this.

Fixed an issue where custom scenes
with invalid yaml could fail without returning a useful error
message to the player.

Updated some logic around old pc
feeling bad about cheating text that hadn't been updated with 0.4.11
changes, as reported by blog commenter “Nobody”.

As suggested by FutureSight, the
blackjack game will now let you hit even when you have 21, for
players who are deliberately trying to lose.

The makeout scenes are now a bit
stricter about what counts as cheating: if you're with someone other
than your partner and you want to not cheat then you need to end
makeouts immediately, even if this means using the harsh “stop
touching me” action. If this action is disabled due to a failed
willpower test then you may have no possible actions that will not
count as cheating – this is a consequence of getting into
compromising situations with other men as a low-willpower character.

Relaxed the conditions for your
partner demanding rough-mode after he finds you cheating.

Following a request by FutureSight,
female-start character creation will now randomly set work
experience. This does not happen for male-start as their
work-experience is set in the male template before feeding into
female-character-creation. Work experience relates to the
character's past life (which is implied to represent the player
themselves in the near future) so it shouldn't be changed by Ivy's
machine.

Relaxed the conditions for NPCs
demanding the PC get pregnant as a way of proving her commitment
when they discover her cheating. Previously this wouldn't happen if
they already had a child together, but this condition has been
removed now.

Increased the event weight for the
event where your bf catches you cheating, as suggested by Blargan.

Beating up the pervy client now
checks the characters' strength values instead of just requiring a
fixed fitness value.

Important: While writing the
custom scene I found the inconsistency in method names was annoying
for writing. As such they've been standardised so that e.g. enjoy
changes now use addWEnjoy instead of addPCEnjoy and medium-scale
modifiers now all use “medium” instead of “med”. E.g.
addArousalMedium. Method calls using the old names will now be
invalid and will need to be changed.

Additionally, the methods using Btm
as an abbreviation for bottom have been renamed to use the full
word.

The methods to get and change liking
levels all now use “liking” instead of some using “liking”
and some “like”.

The following methods have been
renamed to work better with Velocity's property lookup rules (i.e.
starting with “is” or “get”) or for consistency with other
changes:

hasLaceTop → isLaceTopped

likesPlayersBreasts →
getLikesPlayersBreasts

dislikesPlayersBreasts →
getDisikesPlayersBreasts

dislikesNpcBreasts →
getDislikesBreasts

hasCheatedWith → getCheatedWith

hasAnxiety → isAnxious

Some methods still start with other
prefixes (e.g. hasCondom), if I felt their names wouldn't make sense
if replaced with get- or is-

Rigel created an awesome user-defined
language file for notepad++ that does syntax highlighting for
Newlife's vm text files of velocity text within tags. They've kindly
given permission for this to be included in the release and it can
be found in the documentation folder. If you find this useful then
be sure to give Rigel a thumbs-up if you see them online!

Updated the example for adding items
to a list, based on some feedback from Rigel. The old example would
send unwanted text to the output because the list.add method returns
a boolean which needs to handled (by assigning it to a variable) or
it'll end up in the output text.

Added the makeFriend and
endFriendship methods to NPCs.

Added the isAllowedMoreFriends method
to the PC.

Fixed an issue reported by Eulexia
where the $scene context item couldn't be referenced in action
short- or long-descriptions, even though some methods like
capitalise and addPossessiveSuffix have obvious potential uses
there.

Added a method $isNpcHidden to the
Scene object that lets writers test if an NPC has been hidden via
the hideNpc method.

Added the getStrength method to all
characters, returning an integer value.

Added the getGirlOrWoman method to
the PC.

Added 2 new testing traits to NPCs,
for situations where a scene needs more than one.

Added isNpcRough and isRoughAgreed
methods to the scene object.

Added isClothesDisarrayed to the PC
object.

Added getOrgasms to the PC.

Added getCockDesc to male NPCs –
not sure how I missed that one in the previous version, but it's in
there now.

Added setActiveMaleNpcNoArousal along
with updates to the documentation for this method and the similar
setActiveMaleNpc one to clarify when each should be used.

The new method is intended for use in
the intro for sub-scenes whose parent has already used the male NPC's
attractiveness to modify arousal. This lets the writer have them
stored as active without double-counting the modifier.

Writers can now check and set
relationship flags on NPCs.

Added clearPostSexFlags method to the
scene object. This is important for clearing down post-makeout flags
after they've been handled in a returning section, so they don't
confuse the situation if the player transitions to another makeout
later in the scene chain.

Added a list of commonly-used scene
flags to the enum reference (although they technically aren't an
enum, as a flag can be any String). These may be useful to control
how sub-scenes work, or to handle specific situations on returning
from them.

The custom scene testing scene now
sorts NPCs by alphabetical order when they're being chosen, so you
can name your custom NPC “Aardvark” if you want him top of the
list.

As suggested by Rigel, text is now
trimmed of trailing and leading whitespace before being sent to the
UI. This will not prevent unwanted whitespace within the text (e.g.
mid-sentence line breaks) so watch out for those in testing.

Improved the error message returned
when a condition from the yaml file fails evaluation in Velocity.

Monday, 18 September 2017

Hi all,My last post went over defining the first part of the blackmail scene's actions. At that point the actual text in the .vm file was mostly just todo comments. The next stage is to actually fill that in.This also involved a few adjustments to the yaml file, so you should download both of the new ones before running the scene: the yaml and the velocity.It's important to run tests as you go. I found issues in almost every single action while testing, although these have all been corrected in the above files - let me know if you spot any undetected bugs. In my next few posts I'll be putting the spotlight on certain specific parts of the text and discussing them. Let me know in the comments if there are any you want to focus on.

A
quick warning: there are some changes to things like method names
coming in 0.4.12. As such, the examples given here will not work
properly in older versions.

After
planning a scene, the next step to actually making content. There are
a number of ways to do this, and you might find your process is
different from mine – that's fine.

One
approach I sometimes use is to simply write out a key path from the
scene in a text document and then convert it into actions.

For
this scene though, I'm taking the opposite approach: I'm going to
define the actions first and then I'll fill them in with actual text
later. This has the advantage of letting me run tests early on while
the files are quite simple.

I'm
also splitting the scene up into sections. To start with, I'm just
doing the parts in the Part1 diagram from the planning stage. This
makes sense for this scene because part1 covers the path where the PC
complies with blackmail while all the other paths split off from a
single action: the one where her partner finds out about her
cheating.

You'll
see some slight changes from the planning stage such as the new
"agree meekly" action and in later posts you'll see that I
end up making some changes to the yaml files as well.

That's
normal. Scenes usually get refined as I work through them and come up
with new ideas. The plan is supposed to help organise my thoughts and
understand how the scene will flow: it shouldn't be an inflexible
commitment.

I've uploaded these first-step files: YAML and VM. You can run them the normal way, by copying them into the newlife/additional_scenes/user_custom_scenes folder, enabling custom scene testing in the game options and then choosing the test custom scene weekday-evening action. You'll need to use 0.4.12 or later for this to work - that isn't possible at the time of writing, but I'll try to get a dev version out with these custom-scene changes soon.